Who’s Running Election Integrity Commission?!

June 30, 2017

June 29, 2013 (RALEIGH) — Either Co-Chairmen, Kris Kobach and Vice-President Pence are trying to pull one over on the President and the American people, or they are not really in charge of the Election Integrity Commission or they don’t know what they’re doing.

That is my assessment of the hat-in-hand data requests made by that commission to all 50 states. To those of us who have been in the trenches, digging up vote fraud at the state level, the fecklessness of their “request” simply insults our intelligence. You cannot prove vote fraud without some key personally identifying information.

Among the most timid language in their letter to each state was this kinda -sorta request:

I am requesting that you provide to the Commission the publicly available voter roll data for Connecticut, including, if publicly available under the laws of your state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available. . . .

[Now…I open a channel to my inner gonzo journalist in response to the Honorable Vice-Chair, Kobach:]

HEY KRIS. DON’T GO WOBBLY ON US!!!

EVEN I COULD HAVE PUT OUT A LAME REQUEST LIKE THAT AND I’M A PRIVATE CITIZEN!!

YOU WORK FOR THE FEDS NOW!!

WHY DON’T YOU ACT LIKE IT AND PUT A BOOT TO THEIR THROATS??!!

THESE STATES CAN EITHER GIVE YOU THEIR FREAKIN’ DATA OR THEY LOSE A MILITARY BASE!!!!!!!

[Close gonzo channel.]

Now that I got that out of my system, please allow me to explain the basis of my rage.

In 2013, the Voter Integrity Project slogged through 175,000 records between Florida and North Carolina of people with a matching first name and last name, who voted in the November, 2012 election. Since we’re a private research organization, we only had access to public information…but we still found a way.

That way involved a time-consuming, one-at-a-time approach of loading the name and DOB (of the Florida voter) into the NC SBOE voter look-up site. If the DOB matched, we would get a positive return from the NC site, meaning the person had a matching first, last and DOB. We then had to manually review them to see if the middle name made sense. If it did, we opened dossiers on a commercial investigations website to see if each suspected double voter had the same relatives listed in both their Florida and NC address. Only the ones confirmed through that 3rd party vendor were the ones we reported to both Florida’s Secretary of State and to the NC State Board of Elections.

The entire process took months. It also took amazing dedication from around 25 people who sat at their computers for days and weeks in order to complete the task. Finally, we felt strong enough in our evidence as strong enough to report to election authorities in both states. So far, we’ve gotten two felony convictions with several more in the pipeline to convicitons. One even turned into a voter-impersonation case that Florida officials are prosecuting!

Our numbers were small and the work took forever because we could NOT match the kind of personally identifying information that the government can match. As a result, we threw out cases that gave us any doubt with the middle names. So, we might have kept a Mary S. Johnson, we had no way of matching it with the same voter, using a maiden name in one record (like, Mary Louise Johnson). The personally identifying information would have cut through that problem like a hot knife through butter, but we used the tools we had and played by the rules.

While I have my own partisan views, the VIP research team has constantly striven to approach vote fraud with a non-partisan tool set. We’ve never targeted any particular party or race in our efforts and our motto has always been, “let the chips fall where they may.” The data always drives our findings and not the other way around.

That said, let’s be blunt: Republicans want to prove the pervasiveness of vote fraud in America and Democrats do not. The result of their partisan squabble, is that Democrats’ first tactic is to deny that vote fraud even exists. The Voter Integrity Project has taken an “oh really?” approach and have proven them to be liars. Resist-minded government officials typically try to roll us either by destroying the evidence or by blocking our access to it.

We get it all the time. Simply put, a snake’s gotta do what a snake’s gotta do.

In closing… our fading hope was that the Pence/Kobach Commission would cut through the bureaucratic games and get to the bottom of this cancer on our Constitution. If they succeed, they will shock the senses of the American people, who will rise up in unison and demand honest elections across the nation. If they fail, we will get a 3,000 page book that nobody will read and the California-style elections will spread to 49 other states.